Without knowing their significance, they sold them, and the money completely transformed their lives. Now, twenty years later, Taru Takahashi is determined to get his family's heirloom pearls back. The pearls have been in his family for centuries and should never have been sold. He begins his search by travelling to Rio de Janeiro with Mariko, his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, to find Georgio, one of the two sailors who were given the pearls.
On the other side of the world in Sweden, Leif and Ella, their fifteen-year-old daughter, Helen, and nineteen-year-old son, Jörgen, are drawn into the search, at a time when their own lives are in turmoil. When the families unite in the quest for the pearls, no one knows, or even suspects, how their journey will end.